Best of 2008: Ledger, Downey, Slumdog’ lead the way in a year of great movie moments

Tuesday

Dec 23, 2008 at 12:01 AMDec 23, 2008 at 10:19 PM

When we look back decades from now, 2008 will most likely be remembered in film annals as the year that Heath Ledger died, only to be resurrected six months later as a likely Oscar winner for his mesmerizing portrayal of The Joker in the year’s biggest film, “The Dark Knight.”

Al Alexander

When we look back decades from now, 2008 will most likely be remembered in film annals as the year that Heath Ledger died, only to be resurrected six months later as a likely Oscar winner for his mesmerizing portrayal of The Joker in the year’s biggest film, “The Dark Knight.”

Me, I didn’t care for the movie. It was too convoluted and overly simplified to truly resonate. But Ledger was a revelation, convincingly tapping into the character’s sheer madness while also remaining oddly sympathetic. No easy task.

Coupled with his outstanding work in “I’m Not There” and “Brokeback Mountain,” had Ledger lived, he likely would now be ascending to the rarified air enjoyed by fellow Oscar-locks Sean Penn, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Downey Jr., the year’s second biggest story.

Seemingly washed up after his numerous drug-related arrests, Downey sobered up and returned to intoxicating audiences with a trio of terrific turns in “Charlie Bartlett,” “Tropic Thunder” and of course “Iron Man,” in which he displayed some of the most heavy-mettle acting of his career in making a mediocre superhero flick look like art.

He would have been comeback player of the year, too, if not for one of his equally gifted contemporaries from the 1980s, Mickey Rourke, jumping off the mat and applying a doozy of a headlock with Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler.”

Rourke and Downey were just two of the major comebacks in 2008, a year in which old favorites like Indiana Jones and the potty-mouthed ladies from “Sex and the City” also returned in a major way, even though their films were minor disasters, creatively speaking.

Opening just a week apart in May, the two films joined “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” to make this past summer the biggest box-office success on record. A milestone due in no small part to the high gas prices that fueled family stay-cations in which the only trip was to the movies. For this, surprise hits like “Mamma Mia” thank you.

Not all summer flicks were a success, however, as Mike Myers so rudely discovered when his ill-conceived and borderline racist “The Love Guru” created some seriously bad karma, with audiences telling him where to stick his mantra by staying away in droves.

He was not alone. “Speed Racer” quickly (and deservedly) ran out of gas while would-be blockbusters like “Get Smart,” “Wanted,” “Hellboy II” and “Hancock” under-performed. And even though James Franco lit up the screen in the cannabis comedy “Pineapple Express,” the film was as appetizing as a swig of bong water.

For truly blissful slapstick comedy, one needed only to cast their eyes toward the Coen brothers, whose “Burn After Reading” was by far the funniest film of this presidential-election year, and the first in what would be a slew of dramas, comedies and documentaries with political themes.

Of these, the three that really stood out were Oliver Stone’s surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of George W. Bush in “W”; Penn’s electrifying turn as slain gay-rights leader Harvey Milk in Gus van Sant’s “Milk”; and Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon,” a riveting re-enactment of the 1977 conversations British talk-show host David Frost had with disgraced former President Richard Nixon.

When it came to real blood-sucking, however, the politicians had to step aside for a pair of adolescent vampire movies. One of them, “Twilight,” truly sucked. But the other one, a grotesque but deeply moving story about a bullied 12-year-old boy falling in love with a young vampire girl in “Let the Right One In,” was transcending.

Vampires weren’t the only thing that came in pairs in 2008 -- so did a couple of over-the-top performances by Angelina Jolie in “Wanted” and “Changling.”

The latter was directed by Clint Eastwood, who scored his own twofer when Warner Bros. rushed his superior “Gran Torino” into theaters this week to qualify for Oscars.

In it, the two-time Oscar-winning director stepped back in front of the camera for the first time since “Million Dollar Baby” to play a Dirty Harry-like old man learning to change his ways. And he was brilliant.

Ditto for Meryl Streep, who sang and danced up a storm in “Mamma Mia” and later tap-danced around the truth in John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” and did both fluidly.

Two, however, was not a good thing for the new James Bond, Daniel Craig, who in his second go-round as the tuxedoed icon, put audiences asleep with his dull, brooding portrayal in the disappointing “Quantum of Solace.”

Yes, we can no longer count on Bond, but you can still rely on the folks at Disney, who released two marvelous animated features in “Wall-E,” in which two robots memorably conveyed the nuts and bolts of love, and “Bolt,” a winning and often funny take on the “Lassie Come Home” theme. Both dwarfed the vastly inferior DreamWorks factory, which managed to produce nothing but bland unimaginative junk like “Madagascar 2” and “Kung Fu Panda.” Stop with the pop-culture referencing already!

The film of the year, though, by far, had to be Danny Boyle’s crowd-pleasing romantic thriller “Slumdog Millionaire,” which put the motion (and the emotion) back into motion pictures. It was the story of an orphaned Indian boy searching for his great love, but Boyle made the film seem universal. A true masterpiece.

It easily tops my list of the 10 best films of 2008, but picking the other nine was tough, especially with so many outstanding movies to choose from this year. But after much consternation, this is what I decided, beginning with:

1. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE: The year’s best film was poignant to begin with, but even more so after the recent massacre in Mumbai, where director Danny Boyle shot most of Simon Beaufoy’s life-affirming treatise about perseverance and determination as seen through the eyes of an idealistic young man searching desperately for his lost love. Cleverly constructed using the lad’s appearance on the Hindi version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” as a stage to launch a series of flashbacks to his tumultuous childhood, “Slumdog” was that rare animal that had both charm and bite.

2. MILK: Sean Penn gave arguably the performance of his career as slain gay-rights leader and politician Harvey Milk in Gus van Sant’s provocative and endlessly fascinating biopic. Penn admirably set aside his usual theatrics in favor of nuance, and in the process, made Milk’s 1978 murder at the hands of Dan White (Josh Brolin), his onetime ally on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, all the sadder.

3. FROST/NIXON: Director Ron Howard craftily opened up Peter Morgan’s stage play about Richard Nixon’s 1977 sit-down with British talk-show host David Frost and made it even more vivid by getting up close and personal in capturing the nuances of how David slew Nixon’s Goliath. All would have been for naught, however, were it not for a pair of Oscar-worthy performances by Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. Both made Morgan’s words sing.

4. 4 MONTHS 3 WEEKS 2 DAYS: Cristian Mungiu presented an unflinchingly exploration of the dangers and degradations so many woman endure when seeking an abortion, especially in an oppressive chauvinistic society like Romania in the 1980s. Heavy stuff to be sure, but Mungiu depicted it with such raw, honest emotion, that you couldn’t help being absorbed by horrors and heartbreak a pregnant college student and her best friend subject themselves to after arranging a backroom abortion. It was one of those films you just can’t shake, nor should you want to.

5. MAN ON WIRE: James Marsh’s splendid documentary vividly recaptured the time, place and mood in recounting the events that transpired 34 years ago when aerialist Philippe Petit made everyone forget all about Watergate and a souring economy by clandestinely infiltrating the World Trade Center and for 45 glorious minutes walking a tightrope between the tops of the north and south towers, 1,300 feet high. The “coup,” as Petit likes to call it, required months of painstaking preparation, including hours casing the towers to formulate a way to circumvent air-tight security, sort of like bank robbers. And that’s exactly how Marsh thrillingly presented it, putting most Hollywood heist films to shame in the process.

6. THE WRESTLER: Mickey Rourke stepped back into the acting ring and body slammed audiences with his haunting portrayal of a champ turned chump fighting to hang on to what’s left of his faltering life and career. Directed by Darren Aronofsky with a searing mix of drama and comedy, this fascinating, unsentimental character study vividly underscored Bette Davis’ famous line about “getting old ain’t for sissies.”

7. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK: Few movies have shaken or challenged me like Charlie Kaufman’s mind-blowing opus that inventively ruminated on life, love and the trials and tribulations of being human. So powerful were Kaufman’s meditations, they left me seriously questioning my own existence. But there was no questioning the greatness of Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing a lonely, broken-hearted playwright trying to funnel his misery into his art.

8. THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: Fatih Akin’s assemblage of interlocking stories hauntingly explored issues of chance, fate and irony and how each affected three families caught in a tempest that crossed borders, cultures and ideologies. And even though the story’s perimeters were firmly set between Turkey and Germany, the message about the ugliness of hate and prejudice was universal.

9. TELL NO ONE: There’s was no resisting the power of Guillaume Canet’s mind-twisting thriller about a man (Francios Cluzet) suddenly finding himself ensnared in a labyrinth of mystery, danger and romance after he thinks he’s seen the face of a dead woman – his beloved wife (Marie-Josee Croze) who now looks very much alive. Canet made the familiar seem fresh by tinkering with the basic constructs of the thriller genre, and doing it within the confines of a tightly wound plot teeming with police corruption, unsavory characters and Jason Bourne-like chases that set the heart racing.

10. THE VISITOR: Writer-director Tom McCarthy followed up his endearing “The Station Agent” by assembling yet another makeshift family of outsiders sharing a common bond. This time the subject was immigration, as a grieving widower (played with Oscar-worthy panache by Richard Jenkins) got a new lease on life after befriending a pair of young Muslim immigrants. A splendid blend of comedy and drama ensued, as McCarthy vividly exposed the dangers of living in an insular world, shut away from the realm of possibility and the chance to see old things in new ways.

HONORABLE MENTION: “Let the Right One In,” “Wall-E,” “Bolt,” “Gran Torino,” “In Bruges,” “Definitely Maybe,” “Happy-Go-Lucky,” “Burn After Reading,” “Ballast,” “Trouble the Water,” “Encounters at the End of the World,” “The Band’s Visit.”